Whitney E. Laemmli

My current book manuscript, Measured Movements: The Human Body and the Choreography of Modern Life, illuminates how a technology designed to record movement became a tool for managing social, cultural, and political life in the United States and United Kingdom after World War II. Developed by the German choreographer (and future Nazi Minister of Dance) Rudolf Laban in the 1920s, “Labanotation” employed a complicated “scientific” symbology to capture bodily movement on paper. Each chapter of the book explores a new episode in Labanotation’s movement from Nazi Germany to the factories, hospitals, and corporate boardrooms of Britain and the United States. There, it was used to provide spiritual salve for exhausted assembly line workers, to identify and treat war veterans and Holocaust survivors, to screen white-collar job applicants, and by folklorist Alan Lomax to assuage Americans’ unease about a multicultural world. Labanotation’s surprising appeal, I argue, derived from the twin promises it made to its users. First, that movement could provide individuals with a source of emotional solace, personal expression, and spiritual redemption. And, second, that this expressive potential would never go too far: movement would be continually monitored, broken down into its constituent parts, and put in the service of modern states, institutions, and bureaucracies. In creating a notation system ostensibly capable of turning any movement into easily analyzable data, Laban’s work not only served to preserve a fading past, but seemed to open up new possibilities for the literal choreographing of modern life.